Wildcard is Paying Players Who Report Online Hacks in Ark

Believe it or not, snitches do not end up in ditches. In fact, they actually end up with an additional $200 in their back-pocket. Studio Wildcard, the development studio who created the well-anticipated dinosaur survival game, ARK: Survival Evolved, is now offering a cash reward up to $200 for anyone who reports a game-breaking online exploitation. Earlier in the week on the official game's Steam forum, Wildcard announced that a player under the alias ZeroDay(++) contacted the developers regarding a "potential hack/exploit which could force servers to crash unexpectedly, as well as have other unintended side-effects." After learning more about this issue, Wildcard replicated and fixed the exploit. After several hours passed by, $100 had been sent to ZeroDay's PayPal account.

Wildcard recently announced that they are doubling the bounty up to $200 for anyone who reports an exploit "that can have an impact on gameplay or server stability." However, modifications such as aimbots or speed hacks do not qualify as a "threatening" exploit. Furthermore, these modifications are required to work on all of the official online servers. In addition to this bit of information, single-player modifications also do not qualify as dangerous, or game-breaking for that matter. If you encounter an exploit that can potentially ruin the game for thousands of other players, you can submit a report through Wildcard's email address, info@studiowildcard.com. "If we determine that the issue falls outside the scope of 'hacks,' but still qualifies as an extremely critical bug (such as wide-scale easy duping, or methods of crashing the server, etc.), we are happy to still pay out bounties."

For more information regarding ARK: Survival Evolved, check out this article. Ark launched on Steam Early Access earlier this month, and the developers have already gathered more than $10 million in profit, which is an immensely impressive achievement. Please note that any modification that cannot be used on an official online server will be completely disregarded. I do believe that this opportunity will encourage more players to report bugs and exploits, but at the same time, the developers will be losing quite a bit of their profits. If anything, it's an interesting concept. Do you believe Studio Wildcard's decision is sagacious?